Getting Things Done

  1. Two-Minute Actions: You will be surprised how many two-minute actions you can perform even on your most critical projects.
  2. Plan the Next Action: Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do.
  3. The Trick to Decision: Determine what you need to do in order to decide what to do.
  4. Know Thy Job: If you are not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.
  5. Clean up, Close up, Clarify: Most people feel best about their work when they have cleaned up, closed up, clarified, and renegotiated all their agreements with themselves and others. Do this weekly instead of yearly.
  6. Making the Right Choice: You have more to do than you can possibly do. You just need to feel good about your choices.
  7. Review: A few seconds a day is usually all you need for review, as long as you are looking at the right thing at the right time.
  8. Increase Creativity: You increase your productivity and creativity exponentially when you think about the right things at the right time and have the tools to capture your value added thinking.
  9. Getting Unstuck: Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.
  10. Always at Your Best: There is no reason not to be highly productive, even when you are not in top form.
  11. From Hoping to Trusting: Every decision to act is an intuitive one. The challenge is to migrate from hoping it is the right choice to trusting it is the right choice.
  12. Decide the Next Action: Until you know what the next physical action is, there is still more thinking required before anything can happen.
  13. Recurring Thoughts: There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.
  14. Increase Productivity: You need no new skills to increase your productivity -- just a new set of behaviors about when and where to apply them.